Lake Day

All these big, thick books! It feels so... scholarly!

I was intimidated by our million-page algebra book in the beginning,
but we're managing just fine.

We've been learning about stuff like

(read with loud, thundery voice)

The Transitive Property of Equality

(say whaaa?)

Oh yeah.

If a=b and b=c, then a=c.

And we've been learning about stargazing and

the ideas of Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo...

In history we've been reading and watching documentaries

about the Ottoman Empire.

Oh so much sophisticated learning!

****

But in the middle of the week, on Wednesdays,

we leave the books on the kitchen table,

and we take a Lake Day.

It's a 7-minute walk from our house.

  On the weekends we go swimming too,

and sometimes run into friends

(ya know, 'cause they go to school and can only go to the lake on weekends ;)

We moved here when Lu was one month old. I was a young, single mother. Everyone thought I was crazy. What would I do for money? Where would Lu go to school? There are no hospitals nearby! Were we safe, alone on the mountain? We didn't even have electricity in the tiny house I'd built for us!

But it was my dream,

and it all worked itself out,

and it was the best decision I've ever made.

Lu agrees :)

Dishes, Cats, Volunteers, and Islam

Lu really only has one established "chore"- dish-washing. Breakfast and dinner. If he cooks, we swap and I do the dishes (which sucks), although he does usually make yummier meals than I do (because he puts a pound of butter in just about everything he makes).

He does the breakfast dishes right before we start our homeschool day. And he feeds the cats. It's an important quiet time to get him grounded before tackling math or spelling. 

Speaking of cats,  

Lu has been learning ASL (American Sign Language) 

and today I turned around and saw this during his lesson:

That's Monkey. She's our very weird cat.

Happy International Volunteer Day! Cha and I both run projects that host volunteers at our center (which is also our home). Lu has grown up around hundreds (really, hundreds) of super awesome twenty-something-year-olds who are into permaculture, peace education, social justice, sustainable farming, eco-living, social arts, and a bunch of other cool stuff. So THANK YOU to all those wonderful people who have been a part of our work and family. Lu has also benefited greatly from the friendships and examples.

Here's Lu in the volunteer kitchen, 

making pancakes with all the gang:

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We've been exploring the rich and fascinating world of Islam.

 Lu made a poster:

 And we watched some excellent documentaries:

History Channel's - Inside Islam

BBC's - Science in Islam

PBS's - Islam, Empire of Faith

We also drew Islamic tessellations with this tutorial 

It got pretty complicated.

Lu chose green.

I chose red.

We both agree that it was an AWESOME activity.

We didn't even notice that 2 hours had gone by.

And we had a gorgeous morning at the lake this week.

I can't believe it's already December!

iPad this, iPad that

Remember that Lu was saving up to buy himself an iPad?  Well, he did it! And his little package arrived this week.

Amazon doesn't deliver here, so he had to wait until someone was coming down from the US.

For weeks, all I heard about was iPad this, iPad that.

And then, it was here.

We don't see much of the "latest technology" out here, so it's pretty foreign (to me anyway). But Lu, like all children of these times, no matter where they are in the world, come with magic techno fingers. Have you read about the experiment they did with iPads and a group of rural Ethiopian children?

It's like their little fingers just know what to do, as if the machines were telepathically instructing them on their usage. Of course, if you're my age or older and are technologically gifted, you probably think I sound ridiculous - but my kind do still exist.

 

 Alien child from the future.

Anyway, he's totally psyched about it. And I'm very proud of him for saving up (for months), and reaching his goal - even though I am not a big fan of tiny portable devices that connect you to the virtual world, whilst disconnecting you from your physical reality.

But I have to admit, I can see the advantages.

He's now reading Voyage of the Dawn Treader, downloaded for free. I have the whole series in paperback from when I was a kid, except this one, which I lost somewhere along the way. So, that was pretty handy. 

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I remember being ten years old. It was 1985. And I remember calculating with a friend how old we'd be in the CRAZY-sounding year 2000. We wondered what it would be like. Would it be like the Jetsons?

The next year, in 6th grade, our school got its first computers, and we had those horrendously tedious classes that many people my age probably still remember with glazed eyes, as I do.

But I was actually around seven years old when I SAW a computer for the first time.

 Yeah. My mom cut my hair.

A woman across the hall from my dad's office had an Apple computer. He took me over to look at it, and she even let me push some buttons. It didn't really interest me. And when other kids started getting Atari games, it still didn't interest me.

I started knowing people with computers in their homes in the middle school years, but we never got one. Eventually, both my parents started using computers at work, but still didn't need them at home.

I did not own a computer until I was twenty-nine, and I had never really needed one. I was a dancer/choreographer, and ran a small dance school the old-fashioned way: on paper. 

This was the year 2,000,

and we still didn't have flying cars.

Boy oh boy, did my life change when I got that computer. A Mac. I learned Photoshop, music and video editing, and all the other super neat-o things they do. 

Living where we do, it is easy to lose touch with the modern world. I can go months without running into modern-day scenarios, but sometimes it happens, and when it does - like when we go to a bigger town, to a restaurant - it pains me to see so many people looking at screens, rather than at each other. It makes me feel like I'm from another world, in another time - a world that Lu, and all generations to come, will never know.

Do you remember those days?

Just Another Boy in the Kite Contest

Flying kites on the Day of the Dead is a tradition in Guatemala, and this year, our mayor decided to organize a special kite-flying contest for kite-flyers of all ages.

We heard about it over the loud speakers (it's a very small town). Lu wanted to go, but then, at the last minute, changed his mind. And then he changed it back again. So he got his little kite, and off we went.

He wasn't sure if he was going to participate

in the contest.

So he just ran around, off to the side.

But then they announced that

his age group was coming up, and

to please approach the organizers to sign up.

He wasn't sure. He looked at the other kids.

He gave it a good, long think...

 

and then, with a tiny push from me,

and a lady standing next to me,

and his grandmother,

and the guy in the blue pants

(who waved a friendly "come here", 

for which I nominate him for sainthood)...

 

... he signed up!

There was a little practice time before the contest,

 

 and then they called the participants to line up

and show their kites.

And the contest began...

 

Lu's kite crashed a few times...

but he always managed to get it flying again.

Lu didn't actually make his own kite. A friend gave it to him for his birthday. The more serious competitors made their own kites, and the originality of the designs were an important part of the competition. It's about looks and ability to stay in the air, and go really high. Lu's kite was very simple, so he knew he wasn't going to win, but he says that next year he'll make his own kite and really compete.

Some of the kites were incredibly elaborate.

 

I'm proud of him for participating. He is usually reluctant to participate in big local events because the boys can be rough, and sometimes he gets pushed around. He gets picked on because he's usually the only white kid, and he understands it, and we talk about it, but it's still hard to be the odd one out - whether it's because you look different, or move differently, or talk differently, or have a different belief system, or different abilities, or think differently from the majority of people around you - it's always hard to be different. But today, Lu's differences didn't cause problems - he was just another boy in the kite contest, which is exactly what he wanted to be.